This week, in honor of the wide release of Megalopolis, MovieJawn is looking back at some of Francis Ford Coppola’s lesser-discussed work. No Godfathers, Conversations, or Apocalypses right Now. Read the other articles here.

by Fiona Underhill, Staff Writer

After spending the 1970s making a succession of masterpieces–The Godfathers (1972 and 1974), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979)–Francis Ford Coppola turned to the subject of high school and teenagers in the 1980s. He adapted two S.E. Hinton novels back-to-back, with the same crew and some of the same cast, followed in 1986 by the high-school set Peggy Sue Got Married.

Coppola was prompted to adapt The Outsiders (1983) by a middle school librarian who wrote to him pleading that he make a film of the book, which her 7th and 8th grade students had connected with so strongly. Coppola was likely also drawn to the subject matter due to having two sons and a nephew (Nicolas Cage), who were all between the ages of 17-18 during the filming of both Hinton movies, which took place from March to September of 1982. As a former English teacher at an all-boys high school and now a mom of two boys, including a 9th grader who has The Outsiders on his reading list for this year, I can definitely understand why a parent and/or teacher would want to understand teenage boys better through books and movies.

Between The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (also 1983), Coppola is credited with basically creating the ‘Brat Pack’ of young actors who would go on to dominate Hollywood in the 1980s. The role call included Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Mickey Rourke, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Chris Penn, Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Diane Lane, and a little someone who would become the biggest movie star in the world: Tom Cruise. At the center of The Outsiders is an actor who would not  become quite as big of a star as his castmates: C. Thomas Howell, as Ponyboy. Macchio (age 20 during filming) plays his best friend Johnny and, incredibly, was actually a full 5 years older than Howell and even older than Lowe, Dillon, Estevez, and Cruise. However, Macchio looks and sounds about 12 years old in The Outsiders, which works perfectly for playing the naive Johnny, who kills a boy from a rival gang in a fight and then goes on the run with Ponyboy.

Despite both movies being based on Hinton novels and being filmed back-to-back in the same Tulsa, Oklahoma, locations with the same crew, there are significant differences in the aesthetic and atmosphere of the two. The Outsiders is mostly a straightforward teen movie about rival gangs, with more than a dollop of West Side Story in there. Its literary origins mainly come out when Ponyboy and Johnny are holed up in an abandoned church, waiting for the heat from their violent crime to die down. Ponyboy reads Gone With the Wind to Johnny to pass the time, and the sunsets that Ponyboy loves so much feel straight out of the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. Ponyboy also recites a Robert Frost poem to Johnny, with particular focus on the line, “nothing gold can stay,” a reference to the fleeting nature of golden hour but also their youth and innocence, which is now firmly behind them. 

While The Outsiders feels more ‘50s, with its greasers–think Danny from Grease (1978) or The Fonz from Happy Days (1974-1984)–Rumble Fish is much more ‘60s influenced. Beat poetry and the French New Wave permeate the look and sound of the more experimental, avant garde black-and-white film. Every frame features smoke or mist in some capacity, and German Expressionism was also a huge reference for cinematographer Stephen H. Burum. The Police drummer Stewart Copeland composed the music for the film, and the heavy use of percussion mimics the spoken word poetry of Allen Ginsberg and his ilk. Mickey Rourke plays The Motorcycle Boy, the almost mythic and certainly iconic older brother of Dillon’s Rusty James. Rourke’s nebulous, dreamlike presence was based on Albert Camus, and in a stroke of casting genius, Dennis Hopper plays the boys’ father. Tom Waits has cameos in both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, but he certainly feels most fitting in the latter.

The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are just two of a whole host of movies that were made in the 1980s but set in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Coppola’s own Peggy Sue Got Married was part of this nostalgia wave, but of course there were also classics such as Diner (1982), Stand By Me (1986), Dirty Dancing (1987), and Dead Poets Society (1989). The reason why there were so many movies set in this era released during the ‘80s is obviously generational–adult filmmakers were looking back at their youth, frequently with rose-tinted glasses. Coppola would have been the same age as the teens of Outsiders and Rumble Fish in the mid to late ‘50s, which could go some way to explaining why The Outsiders in particular feels like it’s part of this era, despite being set in the mid-60s. The Oklahoma setting also means that it would have been further behind the times than New York or Los Angeles. Other films which featured motorcycle gangs and greasers include The Loveless (1981) and The Delinquents (1989), as well as the ‘70s movies The Lords of Flatbush (1974) and, most famously, Grease. Interestingly, we’ve just had a major movie about this topic for the first time in a very long time: Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, which is set in 1965–the same year that The Outsiders is set in.

With Coppola now releasing his first major movie in nearly 30 years–a passion project that has been in gestation for literally decades–it’s the perfect time to look back at his other films, especially those that don’t quite have the same ‘masterpiece’ status as his ‘70s work. Coppola’s filmography as a whole is fascinating, and it’s revealing to think about everything he hasn’t made, as well as what he has. With Kevin Costner’s absolutely vast Horizon project also being released this year and Coppola’s contemporaries such as Scorsese starting to talk about running out of time and their legacies, it really does feel like a last hurrah for some of the New Hollywood legends. We could be reaching the end of an era–something that Ponyboy, Johnny, Rusty James, and The Motorcycle Boy keenly feel in the Hinton/Coppola collaborations. The passage of time really is a son of a bitch.